Sunday Morning

Sunday Morning

Food fight: Marketing healthy snacks like junk food

(CBS News) As we head into the
holiday season, we'll soon be headed to the holiday food table, too. Experts
have been worried for years that our waistlines are expanding with our ever-expanding
desire for sweet, salty, and often fat-laden goodies. But how can lowly fruits
and vegetables ever compete with the design, engineering, and especially the
marketing of processed food? Lee Cowan reports our Cover Story:

Consider for a moment the carrot.
And, if you can, ignore that it's healthy and comes out of the ground.

From a marketing standpoint, the
carrot is really not all that different from a Cheeto. At least, that's what the head of
Bolthouse Farms seems to think, going by its ad, "Baby Carrots. Now in
extreme junk food packaging!"

"Our first campaign for baby
carrots was, 'Eat 'em like junk food,'" laughed Jeffrey Dunn, Bolthouse's
self-described "Chief Carrot Officer." "We
went right at junk food and said, we don't wanna be against junk food, we wanna
be like 'em."

Dunn knows all about junk food
marketing. His prior job was as an executive at Coca-Cola.

"Coke has done an amazing job
of creating that moment of refreshment that's -- you know, you can picture it
when I say it," he told Cowan. "That's
marketing. We've got to do the same good job for fresh fruits and vegetables.
And there's no reason we can't."

But he knows it's an uphill battle
-- and so does the White House. First lady Michelle Obama has said, "The
deck is stacked against healthy foods like fruits and vegetables."

To help level the playing field, Obama
recently announced that Sesame Workshop would license their Muppet characters -- for
FREE -- to the Produce Marketing Association. Muppets Elmo and Rosita appeared
with the first lady to promote broccoli.

Last year, advertising for fruits
and vegetables amounted to $116 million. That may sound like a lot, but it's
only 1/20th of what was spent on advertising junk food to kids.

Few look at that disparity with such
a critical an eye as New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss. He won
a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the meat industry, including the widespread use of "pink slime" --
that unappetizing material found in some processed beef, including burgers served
in school lunches.

And yet, despite unpleasant
revelations like that, Moss says fruits and vegetables still have trouble
competing.

"As well-meaning as it is,
the government message -- that you should be eating more fruits and vegetables
'cause it's better for you, 'cause it's healthy -- isn't working," Moss.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says two-thirds of adults and one-third of children in America are either overweight or
obese.